Using AI for your emails sounds a bit extra (even far-fetched), but adding it to your email marketing strategy is a lot easier than you think.
You can automatically add personalized product recommendations for your recipients without wasting hours creating the perfect email. Or you can quickly segment your audience into different categories with absolutely no manual effort.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are numerous ways you can use AI to supercharge your email marketing strategy.
In this blog, we’ll dive into nine such methods and understand how they can revolutionize your emails.
- Personalize Your Email Subject Lines
If you’re still shooting emails with generic subject lines like, “Join our event at 7 PM tomorrow…,” there’s no wonder you’re not getting many opens.
Your subject line should not only be convincing enough, but it should directly speak to the recipient. In fact, it should be more about the recipient, and less about you.
Something like, “Katie, are you free tomorrow at 7 PM?” not only sparks curiosity but also makes your email more personal and human.
Now, the million-dollar question: how do you get AI to do something like this?
First, you can always rely on tools like Phrasee or Persado. At the same time, you can also insert dynamic fields in your subject lines. This way, you can add real-time data like recent purchases. For example, “Katie, just for you: 25% off sneakers you’ll love!”
- Share Personalized Product Recommendations
There’s nothing wrong with pitching your products. But what if not all your recipients are interested in the same thing?
Sending out a single email to your entire list is a shot in the dark. That’s why you must share emails that contain personalized product recommendations based on the customer’s purchase history, preferences, and behavior.
Now, there are two main ways to go about this:
- Set up behavioral triggers. By setting such triggers, you can drop personalized recommendations as soon as the customer takes a specific action. For instance, if a customer abandons their cart, you can shoot an email with the items in their cart as a reminder.
- Identify “people who bought this also bought that” patterns. This helps you suggest products that actually complement the customer’s preferences and purchase history.
But to get there, you first need to make sure all your products are well-organized and tagged correctly. Only then can AI match products to user preferences without fail.
- Predict Customer Behaviour to Retain Them
Besides sending personalized product recommendations, you can implement AI to analyze user behavior and forecast their actions so that you can send the right email at the right time to retain your customers.
Take Amazon, for example. It uses AI to predict customer patterns, like when they might reorder items. This allows them to send timely reminders, which pulls the users back to their platform.
In fact, you can also rely on AI to identify which customer is at the highest risk of unsubscribing. Based on this analysis, AI can then create targeted campaigns where it automatically sends a re-engagement email to retain the customer, something like this:
- Put Email Segmentation on Autopilot
Segmenting your email list can be a game-changing tactic for your campaign. Especially when you look at the numbers: segmented emails are 14.3% more likely to be opened than the non-segmented ones.
But let’s admit—manually sorting and segmenting your email list is some work cut out.
Thankfully, with AI, you can now automate email segmentation to not only save time and effort but also be precise about it. Here’s how:
- Group customers based on their behavior. AI can help you categorize your customers by analyzing their activity, such as clicks, past purchases, time spent on your website, etc.
- Update your audience groups in real time. You can build a dynamic email list that updates itself in real time as customer behaviors change. This way, you can create email campaigns that are relevant.
One major tip to get you started: AI performs better when you feed it with data from diverse sources such as CRM tools, website analytics, and even customer support interactions.
- Maintain a Clean Email List
The quality of your email list directly impacts your deliverability. The more cluttered, outdated, or irrelevant it is, the higher the chances of your emails getting flagged as spam.
To combat this, you can use AI-based email list cleaning tools such as ZeroBounce or BriteVerify. These tools can go a long way in detecting invalid email addresses, typos, and spam traps.
Moreover, AI also identifies inactive subscribers so that you can either run a re-engagement campaign or directly remove them from your list.
- Generate Bulk Email Copies in an Instant
Writing email copies for ten different segments on a regular basis is challenging. Plus, it leaves you with no time for other tasks.
AI can assist you in writing your emails without compromising on the quality or your requirements. So, you can generate multiple email copies tailored for different segments within a few minutes.
For starters, there are AI writing tools such as Jasper and Copy.ai that adapt to different audiences and tones. All you need to do is provide them with a brief (how you want the copy to be) and these tools will handle the rest.
But if you run a large business and have a solid budget to spare on this, it’s best to get on a proper AI-email writing tool like Hobby Copy, Mailmodo, and WriteMail.ai.
Important Note:
AI isn’t always perfect. So, make sure you always review the email copies (and tweak them, if necessary) before sending them.
You can also use a text to audio converter to see how your email sounds. This helps refine the tone of your message, and optimize your emails for immersive reading (or read aloud).
- Set Up Automated Email Responses for Quick Follow-ups
Manually following up on every customer action with an email is not only time-consuming but also practically impossible, especially if you have a good customer base.
By automating email responses, you can maintain momentum in your sales funnel. In fact, this can help you achieve 320% more revenue than non-automated emails!
That said, let’s take a look at two ways you can use AI to automate your email responses:
- Send contextual replies. Imagine you provide subscription-based services, and a customer asks about pricing. Using AI, you can follow up in a personalized manner, let’s say by sending a response that includes pricing tiers and even a link to book a demo or start a free trial.
- Set up trigger-based responses. When a customer performs a certain task, such as signing up for a webinar, you can use AI to associate such triggers with your preferred response. In this case, that could be sending an email with all the details regarding the webinar.
But remember, that doesn’t mean your job here is done. You must regularly monitor your follow-up emails to see how effective and relevant the AI is.
- Send Emails Only When Your Recipients Are Most Active
“Timing is everything in email marketing. It doesn’t matter how compelling your email is. Even the best message can lose its impact if it arrives when your recipients are busy or unavailable.”
— [ Ian Nicholls, Founder – Automobilgarage.com ]
As [founder name] says, you must make sure that your emails land in inboxes exactly when they’re most likely to be opened.
But how do you figure out when your users are most active?
One way to do this is to use some of the email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign that offer AI-powered scheduling. These tools use AI to analyze user engagement patterns to find out when your recipients are more active.
And if you have a global audience across different time zones, you can use AI to adjust your send times based on your user’s time zone.
- Make Sure Your Emails Land in the Inbox, Not Spam
But even if you personalize your email and optimize the send time, there’s still a chance that it might end up in your user’s spam.
By using AI in your email marketing strategy, you can monitor your sender reputation to understand your bounce rates and spam complaints.
In addition to this, AI can also help make your content spam-less. For example, it can proofread your content to highlight spam triggers such as excessive links or certain phrases like “FREE,” “ACT NOW,” etc.
Conclusion
You don’t need a massive budget or a full-fledged in-house team to hop on AI. Even if you’re a startup, a small business, or an individual, you can easily incorporate AI into your email marketing effort.
All you need to do is take small, meaningful steps: automating what you can, personalizing content, and reducing the time it takes to write copies.
Start with one or two strategies that we’ve mentioned above, watch the results roll in, and build from there.
And always remember that AI is an assistant, it does not replace you. So, make sure you regularly monitor its performance and review AI-generated content before sending your emails.
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